When we think of a “typical” fish, most of us would envision something like a salmon or a pike. The basic design includes the tail fin, two unpaired fins (dorsal — on the back; anal — in front of the tail), and two pairs of ventral fins (pectoral, behind the gills; pelvic, variable distances farther back). There are perhaps about 30,000 living species of bony fishes, and most of them are “ray-finned” — the fins have supporting rays with webbing in between them.

I recently took a visitor to see the aquaria on display at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration lab on Lena Point. This is not on my usual itinerary, but I became so captivated by one of the denizens in a tank that I decided to write about it anyway.

In late June, I went to Sitka with some friends in time to catch the final performance of the Sitka Music Festival. The music was wonderful, as always, and I had a small bonus: the panoramic windows of Sitka’s Centennial Hall gave me a view of a parade of ravens, flying by ones and twos, all in the same direction — a visual treat to add to the musical one.

Around the time of the summer solstice, I spent a couple of nights in the Cowee Meadow cabin, along with some friends and my visiting niece. We like the flower show in the meadows. This year, everything was a bit early (after the sunny, hot month of May) and flowering was somewhat past its best, but nevertheless we noted as many species of plants in flower or just past flowering as we found last year (over 75 species, barring grasses and sedges).

A friend and I went into Sheep Creek Valley one morning, to listen to bird songs. I especially wanted to hear Swainson’s thrush, whose vigorous, upward-spiraling song is beautiful, and Sheep Creek Valley is usually a good place to do that. We entered the valley around eight o’clock, and I heard fox sparrows, an orange-crowned warbler, a Lincoln’s sparrow, a ruby-crowned kinglet … and a few unenthusiastic, feeble-sounding Swainson’s thrushes.

When we think of parasites, we usually think of tapeworms, ticks, fungi and assorted micro-organisms. But the world of flowering plants provides some interesting examples of a botanical version of parasitism, in which one plant extracts nutrients from another. We have two quite conspicuous and common kinds of flowering-plant parasites: hemlock dwarf mistletoe (Arceuthobium campylopodium) and northern ground cone (with the resounding name of Boschniakia rossica). Both of these species are entirely parasitic (or almost so).

Did you ever wonder how it happens that spruce trees typically have such nice, conical tops? The uppermost shoot, called the leader, produces a particular hormone that suppresses growth in the branches below, most effectively in the branches nearest the leader. The effect dwindles to negligible on the lowermost branches. Voilá! — a conical top to the tree.

This phenomenon is called apical dominance wherein the main, central stem of the plant is dominant over (grows more strongly than) side stems.

One day recently, I was feeling quite grumpy, disgusted, annoyed, and getting down-hearted, so I decided to cheer myself up by thinking about ‘a few of my favorite things’ that happened in the past couple of weeks.

Most of our wild flowers are wide-open structures, just letting all the sexual parts hang out. Think of nagoonberry or cloudberry, asters, avens, silverweed, wild roses, geranium, anemones and so on — all of these just present the sexual organs to whatever insect happens to land there. The smaller flowers of angelica and cow parsnip and their relatives do the same, but present the flowers in flat-topped bunches, making a good-sized landing platform for a visiting insect.

One lucky day in May, I hitched a ride to Pack Creek—a lovely, smooth flight each way. As soon as we arrived, we saw a mama brown bear and a big cub, digging clams far out on the tide flats. Mama noted our presence and went right on digging. There were two solitary bears on the north edge of the tide flat, but that didn’t bother her either. Some fine bear-watching continued for an hour or more.